And Then When The

Dan Disney’s first full-length collection of poetry has at its heart a pleasure at surprise. Like Max Ernst’s ‘fortuitous meeting of distant realities’, Disney’s sometimes absurd, rhetorically-deft poems are the result of a questing imagination driving toward knowledge but able to be side-tracked along stranger, imperative paths. They are restlessly philosophical, and sometimes wildly surreal, and these things go surprisingly well, in Disney’s imagination, with sharp, commonsense observation and understatement. The reader of And then when the may well be touched by a melancholy in the wit. The poetry is finely honed: the exactness of words is beautifully savoured in the lines.